9-29-12 Libby’s Political Stew: 5 Quotes Worth Chewing On!

QUOTE #1 -- US POLICE SHOOT TO KILL

Anne Sewell “Houston Cop Shoots and Kills Double-amputee in Wheelchair”

In an incident outside of a group home in Houston, a police officer shot and killed a wheelchair bound, double-amputee after the man threatened his partner. Unfortunately the object with which the man was threatening the officer's partner turned out to be a pen.

John Garcia is the owner of the home at 4309 Polk where Brian Claunch, a schizophrenic man in his 40's, has been living for the past 18 months with two other men. Garcia has reportedly operated the personal care home for the past eight years.

Claunch apparently caused a disturbance and became agitated when his caretaker refused to give him a soda and a cigarette. Garcia then called the police.

snip

Garcia, owner of the group home told the Houston Chronicle that the deceased, Brian Claunch, was mentally ill. "He sometimes would go off a bit, but you just ignore it," Garcia said.

He said that Claunch had reportedly lost his arm and leg after being hit by a train.

The shooting officer, Marin, has been placed on three-day administrative leave, which is a standard procedure for all officer-involved shootings. Marin was reportedly involved in another fatal suspect shooting three years ago.

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QUOTE #2 -- RAND’s CAPITALISM VS. MLK’s ALTRUSIM

Paul Balles “The Meaning of Altruism”

For Rand: "Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society."

She perceived a choice between: "A morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man's happiness on earth - or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces."

According to Rand: "The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value."

Martin Luther King Jr opposed Rand's philosophy.

"Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness," he said.

Presaging opposition to Rand's ideas, 19th Century British Prime Minister William Gladstone said: "Selfishness is the greatest curse of the human race."

Current Republican candidates for the posts of US president and vice-president, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, both subscribe to a "morality of rational self-interest".

Ryan, an avowed fan of Rand, hasn't grown out of the enamoured college freshman. He not only tried to get all of the interns in his congressional office to read Rand's writing, he also gave copies of her novel Atlas Shrugged to his staff as Christmas presents.

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QUOTE #3 -- WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO LIBYAN AMBASSADOR STEVENS?

Mark Robertson and Finian Cunnigham “Libya’s Green Resistance Did It
And NATO Powers Are Covering Up”

The NATO powers and the bureaucrats they installed in Libya want you to think that all 5.6 million Libyans are happy that NATO and its proxy terrorists destroyed Libya, whose standard of living had been Africa’s highest under Gaddafi.

snip

In reality, the [Libyan Green] Resistance has been increasingly active since shortly after the murder of Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011, as will be shown below. They strike any NATO target they can, and they execute key Libyans who betrayed Gaddafi and sided with NATO. The Benghazi incident was merely their latest blow against what they see as NATO’s illegal occupation of their country.

snip

The more the Libyan Green Resistance gains strength and challenges the NATO-imposed regime, the more clear it becomes that the Western governments and their media lied in their pretexts of “responsibility to protect (R2P)” human rights and democracy. Recall that these were the pretexts invoked by the NATO powers to justify setting up No-Fly Zones in Libya in March 2011. (The same pretexts are again being reiterated with regard to Syria.)

But, as the growing Resistance illustrates, the Western powers did not “liberate” Libya; they invaded a sovereign country and killed massively to execute their real, criminal agenda of regime change and theft of oil resources. Now the people of Libya are resisting this criminal conquest. And that damning truth has to be expunged at all costs.

snip

In an interview with McClatchy news service last Thursday (13 September 2012) the eyewitness said there were no protesters at all.

“The Americans would have left if there had been protesters, but there wasn’t a single ant. The area was totally quiet until about 9:35 pm, when as many as 125 men attacked with machine guns, grenades, RPGs, and anti-aircraft weapons. They threw grenades into the villas, wounding me and knocking me down. Then they stormed through the facility’s main gate, moving from villa to villa.”

That does not sound like a “spontaneous protest” against a blasphemous B-movie that suddenly appeared on the internet, as the White House and others claim; rather, it was a sharply executed military strike that must have been planned meticulously well in advance.

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QUOTE #4 -- NO ACCOUNTABILITY FOR TORTURE BUT FULL OUT PROSECUTION OF WHISTLEBLOWERS OF TORTURE

Chris Floyd “Bloc Party: Pantomime and Power in the Imperial System”

.... The Obama Administration announced on Thursday that it would not prosecute anyone -- no one at all -- for the murder of two prisoners in American's Terror War gulags several years ago. As the story notes, this move "eliminat[es] the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the CIA" under the Bush Administration. Considering that dozens of detainees -- if not many more -- have been killed in detention over the course of the Terror War, this is a remarkable feat of erasure. Killing after killing after killing after killing -- and not a single killer prosecuted by the "Justice" Department of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

No, wait: we do the Peace Prize Laureate wrong in the above claim. The state-ordered, state-approved, state-protected murder and beating and freezing and slamming and stripping and ice-packing and plastic-wrapping of prisoners (many of them innocent people rounded up randomly or kidnapped or sold into captivity by criminals) has in fact produced one prosecution by the Laureate, as the NYT notes.

While no one has been prosecuted for the harsh interrogations, a former C.I.A. officer who helped hunt members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan and later spoke publicly about waterboarding, John C. Kiriakou, is awaiting trial on criminal charges that he disclosed to journalists the identity of other C.I.A. officers who participated in the interrogations.

There, see! The one CIA agent who revealed the names of people who tortured captives is being prosecuted with the full force of the law, with all the righteousness and moral fervor that we would expect from a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate! There's something that any progressive can point to with pride when he or she works the phone banks and doorsteps for Obama, telling people to support the president and save us from the militarist nutballs and enemies of the truth in the Republican Party.

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QUOTE #5 -- ISRAEL CRIPPLED UN 45 YEARS AGO

Alan Hart “Memo to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon: The Door on a Two-state Solution was Closed 45 Years Ago”

The truth of history, which most if not all world leaders know but dare not state, is that the door Ban Ki-Moon sees closing, was actually slammed shut 45 years ago. The precise date of the closure was 22 November 1967. What happened on that day?

In the aftermath of the Six Days War of that year, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted, after much agonizing over five drafts, Resolution 242. At the time it was hailed as the key to a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. It could never have been that and here’s why.

Leaving aside the fact that 242 does not mention the Palestinians by name (it called only for a just settlement of “the refugee problem”), the key to understanding why the resolution was fatally flawed and bound to be a disaster for all who work seriously for justice and peace is in the fact that the 1967 war was a war of Israeli aggression, not as Israel asserted, and still asserts, a war of self-defense by way of a pre-emptive strike.

snip

Because it was a war of Israeli aggression, and given that 242?s preamble does pay lip-service to the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war“, there is no question about what the Security Council should have done. It should have demanded Israel’s unconditional withdrawal from the newly occupied Arab territories. That didn’t happen because President Johnson, guided by his Zionist advisers, refused to have Israel labelled as the aggressor.

There was, in, fact, a precedent for what ought to have happened. When Israel colluded with Britain and France in 1956 to invade Egypt in the hope of toppling Nasser, President Eisenhower insisted that Israel should withdraw from the Sinai without conditions. At the time the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress were seeking to tie Eisenhower’s hands and prevent him from reading the riot act to Israel. He responded by going over the heads of Congress with a prime time television address to his fellow Americans. Among the things he said was this:

“Israel insists on firm guarantees as a condition to withdrawing its forces of invasion. If we agree that armed attack can properly achieve the purpose of the assailant, then I fear we will have turned back the clock of international order. We will have countenanced the use of force as a means of settling international differences and gaining national advantage… If the UN once admits that international disputes can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the very foundation of the organization and our best hope for establishing real world order.”

In November 1967, by not demanding that Israel withdraw without conditions, the Security Council, bullied by President Johnson on Zionism’s behalf, did what Eisenhower had warned against – it turned back the clock of international order and destroyed the hope the UN represented.

snip

Those responsible for framing the resolution were very much aware that Israel’s hawks were going to proceed with their colonial venture come what may, in determined defiance of international law and no matter what the organised international community said or wanted. Put another way, some if not all of those responsible for framing 242 were resigned to the fact that, because of the history of the Jews and the Nazi holocaust, Israel was not and never would or could be a normal state. As a consequence, there was no point in seeking to oblige it to behave like a normal state - i.e. in accordance with international law and its obligations as a member of the UN. Like it or not, and whatever it might mean for the fate of mankind, the world was going to have to live with the fact that there were two sets of rules for the behaviour of nations – one for Israel and one for all other nations. Because of the way Israel was created, mainly by Zionist terrorism and ethnic cleansing and without legitimacy in international law, the UN system now had a double standard built into it, and because the political will to confront Zionism did not exist, there was nothing anybody could do to change that reality.

snip

Contentious though it is to say so in public, I think the corruption charge is supported by the facts. In 1947 the Zionists and their allies in the U.S. Congress subverted the General Assembly of the UN to get a rigged and bare minimum majority for the partition plan which was subsequently vitiated. In 1967 the Security Council was effectively subverted by the Johnson administration’s Zionist-driven refusal to hold Israel accountable to international law and its obligations as a member of the UN.

And thus it was, at least so far as the Arab and wider Muslim world (and me, too) are concerned, that the UN said goodbye to its integrity; and the door to a two-state solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict was closed, slammed shut. Forty five years ago.

[cross-posted at correntewire and open salon]